Or, “please fetch me a rusty fork so that I may gouge out my eyes, okay, thanks.”

I make no bones about my dislike of Pokémon. (In fact… I’ve talked about it before.) I just don’t understand its popularity. Cool creatures with special powers? Very enticing. Many different attributes to remember and factoids to consider? Very educational. A stilted cartoon with whiny voices and less-than-stellar animation? Please make it stop.

Because I do believe it to be educational (in spite of being behind a show that makes me want to stomp on my own eyeballs), I permit my son to partake in the Kool-Aid that is Pokémon. But I may just try to keep this news from him:

The tale of Ash Ketchum, Pikachu and their friends continues as they face some of their biggest adventures yet in the brand new ninth season of the popular Pokémon series. Pokémon: Battle Frontier will air exclusively on Cartoon Network, part of Cartoon Networkââ¬â¢s Saturday morning line-up of comedic and action-adventure programming. The new season kicks off on Saturday, Sept. 9, at 9 a.m. (ET, PT) with a special one-hour episode. The series will air regularly on Saturday mornings at 9:30 a.m. (ET, PT).

Pokémon: Battle Frontier takes Ash and Pikachu back to the Kanto region to complete the Battle Frontier, seven ultimate tests that will challenge Ashââ¬â¢s skills as a Pokémon Trainer. Ashââ¬â¢s friend May must also face some stiff competition as she seeks to win Kantoââ¬â¢s Pokémon Contests and become a top Pokémon Coordinator. Together, these two Trainers and their friends will recruit more Pokémon, battle powerful opponents, and make new friends, all in this climactic ninth season of Pokémon.

It’s the climactic ninth season. Doubtless something totally different will be happening this year, even more exciting and gripping than ever before! (My money is on Brock actually opening his eyes, but that’s just a guess. And I don’t want to spoil it for you.)

I’m sorry; I know that Pokémon has a loyal following and all. But this is still on television (for the ninth year), yet Teen Titans was cancelled? I think I need to go lie down.

You might recall that in this post I alerted you to the Secret of the Fire Nation, the upcoming one-hour Avatar: The Last Airbender movie. You can catch the movie on Nickelodeon on Friday, September 15th, at 8:00 pm.

[Ummmm… waitaminute. Hey, look at that. It’s on at the same time as Trouble in Tokyo. My son’s head may explode. Thank goodness for recording devices, eh?]

Now Toon Zone is reporting that movie promotion will be dovetailing with imminent promotion at Burger King. It seems that Upper Deck will be packaging both Avatar toys and trading cards in kids’ meals:

The promotion, which will run from August 28th through September 30th, will be supported by print, on-air and in-store advertising. Upper Deck will provide Avatar TCG cards to all Burger King outlets in the U.S. and Canada to be included in their Kids Meals. There will be a total of eight different cards to collect and each card will be accompanied by one of eight different Avatar toys.

Why should this matter to you, other than if you feel like eating at Burger King and/or your child is going to want in on the new Avatar Trading Card Game? Why, because Upper Deck may just be bringing the Avatar movie to a location near you:

In conjunction with its Burger King promotion Upper Deck is sponsoring special screenings of a new one-hour special, Avatar: Secret of the Fire Nation at nine theaters in eight major markets including Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Ann Arbor, Louisville and Providence on September 9th. The screenings will include demonstrations of the Avatar TCG and attendees will receive promotional booklets, gift bags, and special trading card game products. Kids lucky enough to be able to attend will also have a leg up on their friends, since the one-hour Avatar: Secret of the Fire Nation special won’t air on Nickelodeon until Friday, September 15 at 8 pm (ET, PT).

It’s not clear to me how you might get an invite to one of these things if you live in one of the target cities, but it may be worth checking out if one of the screenings is in your area. Me, I’ll just be listening to repeated pleas for a trip to Burger King for the next month. Lucky me!

School is finally—FINALLY!—starting here. Tomorrow. Tomorrow my children go back to school. Not that I’m excited, or anything. It has been really magical, having them home all summer, bickering with each other over important issues like who sat on that couch last. Ahem.

Anyway, writing about backpacks got me thinking about the other must-have items with which my children are obsessed. Often it’s a certain brand of shirt or a kind of pants (remember the zip-offs craze? I still twitch a little when I think about it), but this year they are All About The Shoes.

The Shoes™ ’round these parts this year are Crocs, hands down. I don’t know if the craze has gripped the rest of the country the same way, but we are powerless against it, here. Yes. Our youth insist on wearing brightly-colored nursing clogs. Fabulous!

Of course, those with money to burn have the genuine article, and I’m sure my kids would love me more if they did, too. But thankfully for those of us who aren’t driving our kids to school in our Ferraris, there are an endless supply of knock-offs in more affordable brands. After some tense negotiations, we managed to procure the coveted shoes in an acceptable brand, at a price that didn’t land me in the poorhouse.

So. Are they looking forward to seeing their friends again? Meeting their new teachers? Cracking those pristine notebooks, toting the new backpacks, unzipping the new lunchboxes? Of course not. They can’t wait to wear their new shoes.

I have no idea where they got the shoe obsession gene. Maybe from their father.

Stop looking at me.

Your kids have been nattering on about backpacks for the new school year for weeks, most likely. I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that The New York Daily News shares their concerns about which pack is the hippest.

Naturally, the Daily News turned to the experts; and that included one of Ty’s Toy Box’s very own:

“Kids care about who or what is on their backpacks,” says George Stolpe, vice president of marketing for Ty’s Toy Box. “It’s a statement of who they are, what they’re interested in. It’s very personal.”

Hey, I can dig it. I certainly don’t want to carry a purse that someone else picked out for me; I can understand that my kids want to pick their own bags. They’re going to be toting them around for a minimum of 180 days, so it just stands to reason that they’re going to want something they love.

The Daily News goes on to quote Poshmom.com for some tips on how to choose the right bag, and I was okay with their suggestions right up until the last bullet:

Make sure there’s a place for everything: The backpack should have ample pockets and compartments to store everything your kid might need to carry (crayons, pencils, Game Boy, cell phone, etc.). The more places to store things, the better organized your child will be.

I’m sorry… if your kid is small enough to be carrying crayons, why in the world would he be carrying a Gameboy and a cell phone? Why, when I was a child, I had to walk uphill both ways four miles through snow— Oh. Sorry. Bit of a curmudgeon moment, there. I apologize. Ahem.

Back to the bags: The Daily News highlights the demand for character gear, deeming that Hi-5, Lazytown, and Doodlebops backpacks all warrant the “Totally Tubular” moniker. (My favorite bag at Ty’s right now is this adorable Miss Spider “Best Bug Buddies” one, but as the article points out, I don’t really get to pick anymore. I suppose my kids are a bit too old for it, but darnitall, it’s cute.)

Whichever bags your tots end up toting, make sure they can manage them comfortably. And if the kids are being particularly mouthy, might I just suggest removing the Gameboy and the cell phone and replacing them with a few rocks?

[image courtesy of Kids Care Clubs]

It opens tonight, and I’m still debating whether or not I’ll spring a trip to the cinema on my kids as a special treat.

On the one hand, Thomas Rockwell’s book (upon which the film is based) is one of my all-time favorites from childhood. If you haven’t read it (even if you plan to see the movie), you simply MUST. That goes double if you have kids. It’s a magical read, if indeed you’ll allow me to use the word “magical” to describe a story about eating earthworms.

On the other hand, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it is very rare for a movie based upon a great book to live up to the original. So that can make for some disappointment.

To wit:

No worms were harmed in the making of “How to Eat Fried Worms,” but one classic book was.

Oh. Ouch.

And on the third hand, (okay, I don’t really have a third hand, but just go with me on this) the reviews have been fairly evenly mixed, indicating that it will be—at the very least—something my kids would enjoy.

This review, in particular, gives me hope:

In too many kid-oriented films, the child actors mouth off like small, sassy adults, in that creepy way that little girls are painted and teased and costumed to look like minimodels in beauty pageants. Here, the kids, refreshingly, act like kids.

[…]

Best of all, the script doesn’t skirt tough moments. Billy starts off giving his brother, 5-year-old Woody (cute Ty Panitz), a really hard time. It’s so bad that Woody tells Erika, who baby-sits him while Billy eats worms, that he wishes his brother were dead. It’s a punch in the gut moment, but it should ring true for many veterans of sibling battles.

I think it might be worth seeing. The only question is whether we head out this weekend, or wait for DVD. Decisions, decisions….

In the meantime, would it be cruel of me to try to schedule spaghetti for dinner on the same night we finally see the flick…?

Long ago and far away—except that it really wasn’t that long ago, and it happened right here—my son went through that ubiquitous toddler boy phase known as Train Infatuation. A real train passing by on the tracks was cause for whole-body, quivering excitement. Thomas the Tank Engine coming on the television would cause him to drop everything (except, perhaps, the little mini Thomas which was all but surgically attached to him, at that point), go wide-eyed and slack-jawed, and chant “Twain! TWAINS!” over and over.

I’m not going to lie to you. I would watch these trains roll their eyes around and talk without mouths in Ringo Starr or George Carlin’s voice, and I may have wished for the sweet release that only death or a total cable outage and the magical disappearance of our DVD collection could bring. I perhaps didn’t have the same appreciation of Thomas and his pals as my son did.

But as the years have passed (and even though it’s rarer for him to pull out the bins full of tracks and cars and build Sodor Island in our playroom), I realize that there was important wisdom to be learned, aside from that magical trains don’t need mouths to speak. Here are just a few of the timeless lessons Thomas and his cohorts have imparted:

• It’s good to be a very useful engine.
• Hiding in a tunnel to try to keep your paint fresh and shiny can result in getting stuck.
• Being snotty has repercussions.
• It’s not nice to play tricks on your friends.
• It’s uncomfortable to have fish in your boiler.
• Doing as you’re told is probably the wisest choice.

See? Everything we needed to know. My son concurs.

What? Stop looking at me like that.

Have you been watching Who Wants To Be A Superhero? on the SciFi Channel? No? Why not? Did you know it’s from none other than the inimitable Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics godfather? And did you know that it’s turning into a runaway hit?

Why not, right? As a culture, we are wholly obsessed with superheroes—from the cartoons our kids watch to the movies we choose to see at the theatre. I’ll admit it: I had my doubts. I thought the show would be too hokey to hold any real appeal. But oh, how wrong I was.

Comics Continuum brought us a great update, yesterday:

Sci Fi Channel is declaring Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, Stan Lee’s reality series, a hit.

According to Sci Fi, the series has shown week-to-week growth and has provided significant ratings gains for the network.

Season-to-date, Who Wants to Be a Superhero? is up 29 percent in Household ratings, 48 percent in Persons 18-49s and 44 percents in Persons 25-54s.

The fourth episode last Thursday delivered a 1.32 HH rating (plus-10 percent vs. previous week and plus-48 percent vs. its July 27 series premiere), 1.031 million viewers 18-49 (plus-27 percent vs. previous week), 899,000 viewers 25-54 (plus-28 percent vs. last week) and 1.815 million total viewers.

Since its premiere on Sci Fi, Who Wants to Be a Superhero? has grown at least 10 percent week-to-week in the 18-49 and 25-54 key demos. The fourth episode grew 62 percent from the premiere among viewers 18-49 and 61 percent among viewers 25-54.

If you haven’t been watching, tomorrow is the perfect time to tune in and get on the bandwagon:

In the new episode this Thursday, the three remaining superheroes — Fat Momma, Feedback and Major Victory — are judged by Lee’s toughest critics: children. Then Lee tests their intellect and ingenuity in a time-based challenge following clues to locate their archenemy, the Dark Enforcer, at Universal Studio’s City Walk.

I’m rooting for Fat Momma, personally. But we can still be friends if you have a different favorite. And I can barely suppress my glee at the notion of these folks being subjected to the scrutiny of children. As any mom knows, there’s nothing quite like it.

Best of luck to the remaining contestants, and may the best hero win!

The kids are headed back to school in just over a week. Soccer practice is starting. The days are getting shorter again, and at night there is a perceptible chill in the air.

Soon, we’ll be Back On Schedule. Bedtime will be an ironclad deadline once again. There will be homework, and Saturday games to get to, and early morning oatmeal.

The biggest change—at least in my kids’ minds—will be the television restriction. Although I am quick to boot them outside to play on nice days in the summer, I also have no problem letting them watch TV for a few hours on a rainy day. And while I’m getting organized for the day in the morning, it’s not unusual for them to have breakfast in front of the set. Why not? During the school year, though, they’ll be lucky to get half an hour of TV in the evening, if that. They’re already lamenting how all of that learning and organized exercise is going to seriously cut into their viewing time.

Poor dears.

On some level, it cracks me up that they see summer as Television Time. At the same time when I’ve given up my viewing (because all of the shows I favor are, of course, on hiatus until fall), they’re like leeches on the screen. “Noooooo, Mama! Don’t make us go outside and PLAY! We haven’t seen this episode ten times yet!”

And now we enter my favorite time: With the return to school and routine and fewer TV hours, they’ll have to really think about what they want to watch. Which will be the favored show(s) this season? Only time will tell.

[image courtesy of NSGA - Sportime International]

Remember when I told you that the Teen Titans movie was coming to Cartoon Network next month, but no one seemed to know when? Remember how I said that I’d let you know as soon as I found out? This is me, jumping up and down like a little girl, all excited!

Many thanks to Titans Tower for pointing out that Comics Continuum has the definitive scoop on Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo:

Cartoon Network has informed The Continuum that Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo will air on Friday, Sept. 15 at 7:30 p.m.

Here’s how the network describes the film:

“When a high-tech ninja attacks Titans Tower, Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Raven and Beast Boy spring into action. Robin finds out that the ninja was sent by a mysterious and menacing Japanese criminal known as Brushogun, and the Teen Titans travel to Tokyo to track the villain down.”

The film is also scheduled to repeat on Saturday, Sept. 16 at 7:30 p.m. Please note Cartoon Network’s schedules are always subject to change.

No word yet on when the movie — which was screened at Comic-Con International — will be available on DVD.

I guess I know what we’ll be doing for Movie Night on September 15th. (Well, I know what I’ll be doing, anyway. I’m not sure my kids are going to make it through these last few days of Summer intact. They’re ust a few choice morsels of backtalk away from having their television privileges revoked indefinitely.)

Save the date and get ready. It’s really almost here!

Is it possible to dislike Elmo? Apparently it is, yes, and not just because he’s annoying and speaks in the third person. When my children were young enough to enjoy Sesame Street, they were drawn to Elmo like moths to a flame, and my friends and I sat around lamenting the “good old days” when Bert and Ernie got more screen time and Super Grover was always on hand to create calamity. Sure, today’s Sesame Street is reminiscent of what we grew up watching, but it’s different. For a variety of reasons.

Well, Joel Stein wants to place the blame squarely on Elmo’s fuzzy little shoulders, and I can’t help but laugh, even as I not-so-secretly agree:

Yes, I know that children love Elmo. But children are idiots. That’s why we don’t let them have jobs. Could you imagine an office full of children? They’d spend all day telling dumb jokes and talking about their poop. It would be like it was before women entered the workplace.

[…]

When I watched “Sesame Street” in the ’70s, the human cast and the Muppets were quirky adults who didn’t talk down to me with baby voices. Now the human cast gets almost no airtime, and the show is dominated by Elmo, Baby Bear and, now, Abby Cadabby ââ¬â preschoolers enamored by their own adorable stupidity.

The lesson they teach ââ¬â in opposition to Oscar, Big Bird, Grover or Bert ââ¬â is that bland neediness gets you stuff much more easily than character. We are breeding a nation of Anna Nicole Smiths.

Is Stein taking it to an extreme? Probably. I mean, I hope so. For the sake of the children.

But I have a confession to make: Even when my kids were in the target age group for Sesame Street, as the keeper of the remote control I often announced that Sesame Street was unavailable, so how about Between the Lions, instead? I’m a sucker for the Chicken Jane segments. That’s what Sesame Street used to be like, before Elmo arrived on the scene.

Read the whole piece if you need a little sanctioned Elmo-bashing. Stein’s ideas for a solution are particularly amusing.

In the meantime, I think we’ll stick to characters who actually learn things. And who don’t make me want to stick forks into my eardrums.